Must resist!!

Two days until I undertake perhaps the toughest personal challenge of all — tougher than sometime riding the Tour de France route twenty-four hours behind the actual athletes: The abandonment of all refined sugars from my diet for the next fourty days and fourty nights. Yes, I’m giving up chocolates, biscuits and other assorted candy for lent.

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It’s only late January and as I write this eighteen floors above the city floor there is snow dropping lightly from dull overcast clouds onto the streets below. It’s been a mild winter here for the most part and today’s temperature is hovering at the freezing mark, though a stiff breeze ensures the feels-like temperature is several degrees colder in reality. Suffice to say it’s a day better suited to being holed up here with the heating on, or, with the correct inspiration down in the gym or the swimming pool below me. It’s certainly not a day to be out on the bike.

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Both Cavendish and Wiggins have the opportunity to help bring unprecedented glory to British cycling

Twenty hundred and twelve has the potential to be a huge year for British Cycling. With both Bradley Wiggins and Christopher Froome proving last year they can podium in a grand tour and with the 2012 Tour de France route suited better than ever towards one or both of them competing for the GC, and with Mark Cavendish going for Green again, not to mention the Olympic road race, and a stack of track riders looking to aid to Britain’s gold haul, this could be the year Britain becomes the best cycling nation on earth. To have said that not even ten years ago would have brought sniggering from all angles and much ridicule.

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Sizing up the two words that surely haunt any cyclist, good or bad, pro or rank amateur, the most: ‘Winter Training’.

As I sit here writing this, 18 stories above the frozen, frigid and snow lined streets of Toronto, Ontario, we’re already entering the third week of January and depending on who you are and perhaps your location on the globe your 2012 cycling year will be at some stage or another. If you’re one of the paid few on the books of this new WorldTour, your season of racing is only a day away down at the Tour Down Under. If you’re an amateur enthusiast from a part of the world with an acceptable year round climate (ie. not Canada) you might well be trudging out the miles and racking up the stamina on those weekend road rides ahead of your season (if you race that is, for otherwise your season may never begin and therefore never end). Or, if you’re like me — the fair weather cyclist — in a climate that sits well into the negative digits for three-point-five months per year, with a mental allergy towards gyms, you’ll be on the fringes of beginning a pre-season — having put it off long enough — in the hopes that the mountain bike sitting in the spare room (soon to become a nursery) and very soon to be relegated to the storage cage until the snow melts, will get value for money when the hammer drops on the first race of the season in 15 weeks time.

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Welcome to The Cycle Seen! Not just a cycling website, but a state of mind.

Hello! I hope this finds you and your loved ones well and in good spirits in the early throws of 2012? Good to hear. Well, you’ve either happened upon here by design or by freak accident, though I make no apologises for either, but I hope you’ll stick around for a little while or at least to hear me out as I take a minute to explain what this is all about.

The Cycle Seen is a gawk into the life of one average amateur cycling hobbyist who rides for fun and spends some time indulging in armchair expertise by watching the little stickmen do it best on the television as well. Hence, my own cycle, or the wider cycle scene, as seen by me.

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